Happy New Year! With 2024 comes new ideas and possibilities for your app marketing strategy. The app world constantly changes every year, and staying on top of the latest trends and developments is the most strategic way to ensure your marketing efforts are fresh and compelling to drive user growth.
Last year, Yodel Mobile predicted what was going to be crucial changes in the app world with some great success. Understanding what lies ahead in the coming year can better prepare you for upcoming challenges, enabling you to develop campaign ideas well in advance. For example, 2023 saw some significant updates from the tech giants. Apple and Google introduced their new privacy solutions, the Link Tracking Protection and the Privacy Sandbox, respectively, into beta. Now, in 2024, these beta solutions will be released.
So, this year, we’ve gathered our Yodel Mobile experts have come together to share their predictions around the essential app marketing developments in 2024 to get you ahead of the competition. These include new trends in the industry and crucial metrics we think you should track.
Prediction 1: We’ll see a Higher Adoption of AI Technology
Ellie Hines – Associate Lead App Consultant
‘For this year, I believe that AI will be an even bigger part of the app world than it already is. I think it will be most important when helping to personalise your CRM campaigns to enhance the user experience. Using user data and behaviours to create super personalised experiences and custom content, making individual recommendations on products and content. Chatbots are already using this technology, but I think we’ll see that becoming even smarter this year with AI.’
AI has already started to make its mark on the app industry, such as Adobe Firefly plugging in to creative teams to efficiently utilise generative AI to create new images for your app store listing. Personalisation is also becoming imperative for apps to find success in the new year, so using AI for efficiency to save time and resources for your team will be very useful.
Prediction 2: Performance Campaigns will Demand User Generated Content
Sandip Patel – Creative Lead
‘Utilising User Generated Content for paid acquisition campaign creatives has been a hot topic for a few years. It’s no longer a nice-to-have but a necessity for scaled performance campaigns. We are seeing more apps dabble in this, but moving in this direction in a scalable way by using influencer management platforms will become a core part of scaling performance campaigns in 2024.’
Users’ trust in apps and what they are downloading is key for app marketing success. User Generated Content can serve as social proof that influences potential user perception. This will help your campaigns reach higher conversions and allow personalisation throughout your campaign.
Prediction 3: App Owners Will Have to Embrace Privacy
Megan Dean – Strategy Growth Director
‘Privacy concerns are going to be vital to think about this year. iOS SKAN rocked the industry a few years ago, drastically reducing the ability to track performance campaigns. Since then, a lot of companies have tried to get around this. For example, with creative testing, it’s standard to conduct the majority of tests on Android and transfer these learnings over to iOS. However, in 2024, we will likely see more privacy restrictions on Android, such as the privacy sandbox. We’ve been working internally to build testing frameworks that work with privacy requirements to continue gathering strong insights on both OSs as the industry changes. As SKAN continues to develop (with lots of new capabilities coming in 2024!) and what might be a completely different approach from Google coming into play this year, everyone will have to adapt quickly and adjust to the new normal!’
Yodel Mobile has already reviewed the different privacy changes. The importance of these changes for apps cannot be understated. App marketers must adapt to these changes and find new ways to get user information.
Prediction 4: New App Store Features Will Help Drive Acquisition and Re-Engagement
Igor Blinov – ASO Director
‘There are new features on Google Play that give us far more insight into experiments and more capabilities similar to Custom Product Pages on iOS. We also expect Promotional Content (the Android version of In-app Events) to be available to all developers in 2024 – which has been a massive driver of acquisition and re-engagement on iOS. These new capabilities will allow ASO to make even more impact on your marketing efforts, and give us more control over its part in the user acquisition journey, ultimately improving acquisition KPIs.’Â
It’ll be exciting to see what apps can do with Android’s Promotional Content when it is available to all developers. It is already seeing good results, with apps using it seeing a 4% higher revenue than apps not using the feature. This will hopefully give more control to marketers and enhance ASO opportunities.
Prediction 5: ROI will become the Essential KPI to Track in 2024
Rishan Weerakoon – Strategy Growth Director
‘While we’re seeing a bigger emphasis on ROI as a KPI for app acquisition, companies with legacy technology and those who are not mobile-first have struggled with visibility on this vital metric. We’re seeing more data architecture work which aims to identify the role of each platform and its contribution to overall ROI, which we expect to continue to become more important over this year, especially as privacy changes make this more difficult.’
Due to the privacy changes already discussed earlier, marketers will have to think about how they can track their app’s performance without breaching these new rules. Therefore, investing in new technology that can help track your user’s actions will be imperative to see success in 2024.
Conclusion
2024 promises to be an exciting year for the app space. With evolving consumer behaviours, technological changes and privacy policies coming to the forefront, this year continues to require app businesses and marketers to remain agile in their strategies.
Having recently won the Most Effective Mobile Campaign at the Effective Digital Marketing Awards in 2023, we have a pretty good idea of what is going to impact the mobile industry in 2024. Reach out to our app marketing experts for advice and support to make 2024 a success for your app.
